"When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune."
~ Albert Camus
Sunday, July 10, 2011
The Man Who Invented Free Love
by Christopher Turner
When Wilhelm Reich, the most brilliant of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud's pupils, arrived in New York in August 1939, only a few days before the outbreak of war, he was optimistic that his ideas fusing sex and politics would be better received there than they had been in fascist Europe. Despite its veneer of puritanism, America was a country already much preoccupied with sex – as Alfred Kinsey's renowned investigations, which he had begun the year before, were to show. However, it was only after the second world war that the idea of sexual liberation would permeate the culture at large. Reich could be said to have invented this "sexual revolution"; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would be possible only once sexual repression was overthrown. That was the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks. "A sexual revolution is in progress," he declared, "and no power on earth will stop it."
Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. It was the panacea for all ills, he thought, including the fascism that forced him from Europe. In his 1927 study The Function of the Orgasm, he concluded that "there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction" (the italics are his). Seeking to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism, he argued that repression – which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition – could be shed, leading to what his critics dismissed as a "genital utopia" (they mocked him as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"). His sexual dogmatism got him kicked out of both the psychoanalytic movement and the Communist party. Nevertheless, Reich was a figurehead of the sex-reform movement in Vienna and Berlin – before the Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine European society, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany along with those of Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud. Reich fled to Denmark, Sweden and then Norway, as fascism pursued him across the continent.
Soon after he arrived in the United States – by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity – Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about sex came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users' "orgastic potency" and, by extension, their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere and which he christened "orgone energy"; in concentrated form, these mysterious currents could not only help dissolve repressions but treat cancer, radiation sickness and a host of minor ailments. As he saw it, the box's organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, acting as a "greenhouse" and, supposedly, causing a noticeable rise in temperature in the box.
The charismatic Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics. After two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich's claims. However, the orgone box became fashionable in America in the 1940s and 50s, and Reich grew increasingly notorious as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country. The accumulator was used by such countercultural figureheads as Norman Mailer, JD Salinger, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Dwight Macdonald and William S Burroughs. In the 1970s Burroughs wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled "All the Accumulators I Have Owned". In it, he boasted: "Your intrepid reporter, at age 37, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas." At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in Sleeper (1973), giving it the immortal nickname the "Orgasmatron".
To bohemians, the orgone box was celebrated as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora's box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague – the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex. Reich's eccentric device can be seen as a prism through which to look at the conflicts and controversies of his era, which witnessed an unprecedented politicisation of sex. When I first came across a reference to the accumulator, I was puzzled and fascinated: why on earth would a generation seek to shed its sexual repressions by climbing into a closet? And why were others so threatened by it? What does it tell us about the ironies of the sexual revolution that its symbol of liberation was a claustrophobic metal-lined box?
Because of his radical past, Reich was placed under surveillance almost as soon as he arrived in America and he was interned at the outbreak of war under suspicion of being a communist (his FBI file is 789 pages long). After the Soviet invasion of Finland, however, he became a committed anti-Stalinist. He rejected politics and now referred to the "self-regulating" sexual utopia of his imagination as "work-democracy", which many of his fans among America's avant-garde identified with eroticised anarchy.
In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, when the world was trying to understand the Holocaust, and intellectuals disillusioned with communism fled the security of their earlier political positions, Reich's ideas landed on fertile ground. After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, Reich's theory of sexual repression seemed to offer the disenchanted left a convincing explanation both for large numbers of people having submitted to fascism and for communism's failure to be a viable alternative to it. Reich, capturing the mood of this convulsive moment, presented guilty ex-Stalinists and former Trotskyites with an alternative programme of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. In his biography of Saul Bellow, who bought an orgone box in the early 50s and sat in it for daily irradiations, James Atlas wrote that "Reich's Function of the Orgasm was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky's Art and Revolution had been a decade before."
In creating a morality out of pleasure, Reich allowed postwar radicals to view their promiscuity as political activism and justify their retreat from traditional politics. Reich made them feel part of the sexual elite, superior to the "frozen", grey, corporate consensus. People sat in the orgone box, whose empty chamber reflected the political vacuum in which the left then found itself, hoping to dissolve the toxic dangers of conformity, which, as Reich had eloquently suggested as early as 1933, bred fascism. As Michael Wreszin put it in his 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald, who promoted Reich's ideas in his anarchist-pacifist magazine Politics and hosted nude cocktail parties and orgies at his Cape Cod retreat: "In the gloom of the cold war years intellectuals whose historicism had been shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves to a prosperous anti-communist society or taking a stand directly on what Mailer, citing Reich, called 'the rebellious imperatives of the self'."
Read more:
When Wilhelm Reich, the most brilliant of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud's pupils, arrived in New York in August 1939, only a few days before the outbreak of war, he was optimistic that his ideas fusing sex and politics would be better received there than they had been in fascist Europe. Despite its veneer of puritanism, America was a country already much preoccupied with sex – as Alfred Kinsey's renowned investigations, which he had begun the year before, were to show. However, it was only after the second world war that the idea of sexual liberation would permeate the culture at large. Reich could be said to have invented this "sexual revolution"; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would be possible only once sexual repression was overthrown. That was the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks. "A sexual revolution is in progress," he declared, "and no power on earth will stop it."
Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. It was the panacea for all ills, he thought, including the fascism that forced him from Europe. In his 1927 study The Function of the Orgasm, he concluded that "there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction" (the italics are his). Seeking to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism, he argued that repression – which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition – could be shed, leading to what his critics dismissed as a "genital utopia" (they mocked him as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"). His sexual dogmatism got him kicked out of both the psychoanalytic movement and the Communist party. Nevertheless, Reich was a figurehead of the sex-reform movement in Vienna and Berlin – before the Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine European society, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany along with those of Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud. Reich fled to Denmark, Sweden and then Norway, as fascism pursued him across the continent.Soon after he arrived in the United States – by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity – Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about sex came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users' "orgastic potency" and, by extension, their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere and which he christened "orgone energy"; in concentrated form, these mysterious currents could not only help dissolve repressions but treat cancer, radiation sickness and a host of minor ailments. As he saw it, the box's organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, acting as a "greenhouse" and, supposedly, causing a noticeable rise in temperature in the box.
The charismatic Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics. After two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich's claims. However, the orgone box became fashionable in America in the 1940s and 50s, and Reich grew increasingly notorious as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country. The accumulator was used by such countercultural figureheads as Norman Mailer, JD Salinger, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Dwight Macdonald and William S Burroughs. In the 1970s Burroughs wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled "All the Accumulators I Have Owned". In it, he boasted: "Your intrepid reporter, at age 37, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas." At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in Sleeper (1973), giving it the immortal nickname the "Orgasmatron".
To bohemians, the orgone box was celebrated as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora's box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague – the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex. Reich's eccentric device can be seen as a prism through which to look at the conflicts and controversies of his era, which witnessed an unprecedented politicisation of sex. When I first came across a reference to the accumulator, I was puzzled and fascinated: why on earth would a generation seek to shed its sexual repressions by climbing into a closet? And why were others so threatened by it? What does it tell us about the ironies of the sexual revolution that its symbol of liberation was a claustrophobic metal-lined box?
Because of his radical past, Reich was placed under surveillance almost as soon as he arrived in America and he was interned at the outbreak of war under suspicion of being a communist (his FBI file is 789 pages long). After the Soviet invasion of Finland, however, he became a committed anti-Stalinist. He rejected politics and now referred to the "self-regulating" sexual utopia of his imagination as "work-democracy", which many of his fans among America's avant-garde identified with eroticised anarchy.
In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, when the world was trying to understand the Holocaust, and intellectuals disillusioned with communism fled the security of their earlier political positions, Reich's ideas landed on fertile ground. After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, Reich's theory of sexual repression seemed to offer the disenchanted left a convincing explanation both for large numbers of people having submitted to fascism and for communism's failure to be a viable alternative to it. Reich, capturing the mood of this convulsive moment, presented guilty ex-Stalinists and former Trotskyites with an alternative programme of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. In his biography of Saul Bellow, who bought an orgone box in the early 50s and sat in it for daily irradiations, James Atlas wrote that "Reich's Function of the Orgasm was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky's Art and Revolution had been a decade before."
In creating a morality out of pleasure, Reich allowed postwar radicals to view their promiscuity as political activism and justify their retreat from traditional politics. Reich made them feel part of the sexual elite, superior to the "frozen", grey, corporate consensus. People sat in the orgone box, whose empty chamber reflected the political vacuum in which the left then found itself, hoping to dissolve the toxic dangers of conformity, which, as Reich had eloquently suggested as early as 1933, bred fascism. As Michael Wreszin put it in his 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald, who promoted Reich's ideas in his anarchist-pacifist magazine Politics and hosted nude cocktail parties and orgies at his Cape Cod retreat: "In the gloom of the cold war years intellectuals whose historicism had been shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves to a prosperous anti-communist society or taking a stand directly on what Mailer, citing Reich, called 'the rebellious imperatives of the self'."
Read more:
Dying Languages
by Tim Johnson
AYAPAN, Mexico -- Only two people on Earth are known to speak the Ayapanec language, Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velasquez, old men of few words who are somewhat indifferent to each other's company.
When Segovia and Velasquez pass away, their language also will go to the grave. It will mark the demise of a unique way of describing the lush landscape of southern Mexico and thinking about the world.
Ayapanec isn't alone in its vulnerability. Some linguists say that languages are disappearing at the rate of two a month. Half of the world's remaining 7,000 or so languages may be gone by the end of this century, pushed into disuse by English, Spanish and other dominating languages.
The die-off has parallels to the extinction of animals. The death of a language, linguists say, robs humanity of ideas, belief systems and knowledge of the natural world. Languages are repositories of human experience that have evolved over centuries, even millennia.
"Languages are definitely more endangered than species and are going extinct at a faster rate," said K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of the book "When Languages Die." "There are many hundreds of languages that have fewer than 50 speakers."
Hot spots for endangered languages may not be where you think. They include places such as Oklahoma, which holds the highest density of indigenous languages in the United States, partly because faraway tribes were forcibly relocated there in the 1800s; northern Australia, home to many small and scattered Aboriginal groups; and Central Siberia, which has 25 Turkic, Mongolic and other languages that face extinction.
In Mexico's Tabasco state, which faces the Gulf of Mexico, several languages and their dialects are in agony. Less than 2 miles northwest of the town of Ayapan is Cupilco, home to a handful of elderly residents who still speak a dialect of Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztecs. Linguists call the dialect "moribund" because no children speak it.
Silence Looms
When Ayapanec and Cupilco Nahuatl die, bridges will not fall down. Ecosystems will not be disrupted. Few may notice. Language is an invisible triumph of humanity and its disappearance brings only silence.
"It's not as flashy as a pyramid but it represents enormous human achievement in terms of the thought and effort that went into it," said Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist at Indiana University who's about to publish a dictionary and grammar of Ayapanec.
Read more:
AYAPAN, Mexico -- Only two people on Earth are known to speak the Ayapanec language, Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velasquez, old men of few words who are somewhat indifferent to each other's company.
When Segovia and Velasquez pass away, their language also will go to the grave. It will mark the demise of a unique way of describing the lush landscape of southern Mexico and thinking about the world.
Ayapanec isn't alone in its vulnerability. Some linguists say that languages are disappearing at the rate of two a month. Half of the world's remaining 7,000 or so languages may be gone by the end of this century, pushed into disuse by English, Spanish and other dominating languages.The die-off has parallels to the extinction of animals. The death of a language, linguists say, robs humanity of ideas, belief systems and knowledge of the natural world. Languages are repositories of human experience that have evolved over centuries, even millennia.
"Languages are definitely more endangered than species and are going extinct at a faster rate," said K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of the book "When Languages Die." "There are many hundreds of languages that have fewer than 50 speakers."
Hot spots for endangered languages may not be where you think. They include places such as Oklahoma, which holds the highest density of indigenous languages in the United States, partly because faraway tribes were forcibly relocated there in the 1800s; northern Australia, home to many small and scattered Aboriginal groups; and Central Siberia, which has 25 Turkic, Mongolic and other languages that face extinction.
In Mexico's Tabasco state, which faces the Gulf of Mexico, several languages and their dialects are in agony. Less than 2 miles northwest of the town of Ayapan is Cupilco, home to a handful of elderly residents who still speak a dialect of Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztecs. Linguists call the dialect "moribund" because no children speak it.
Silence Looms
When Ayapanec and Cupilco Nahuatl die, bridges will not fall down. Ecosystems will not be disrupted. Few may notice. Language is an invisible triumph of humanity and its disappearance brings only silence.
"It's not as flashy as a pyramid but it represents enormous human achievement in terms of the thought and effort that went into it," said Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist at Indiana University who's about to publish a dictionary and grammar of Ayapanec.
Read more:
The Next, Worse Financial Crisis
by Brett Arends
The last financial crisis isn’t over, but we might as well start getting ready for the next one.
Sorry to be gloomy, but there it is.
Why? Here are 10 reasons.
1. We are learning the wrong lessons from the last one. Was the housing bubble really caused by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, “liberals” and so on? That’s what a growing army of people now claim. There’s just one problem. If so, then how come there was a gigantic housing bubble in Spain as well? Did Barney Frank cause that, too (and while in the minority in Congress, no less!)? If so, how? And what about the giant housing bubbles in Ireland, the U.K. and Australia? All Barney Frank? And the ones across Eastern Europe, and elsewhere? I’d laugh, but tens of millions are being suckered into this piece of spin, which is being pushed in order to provide cover so the real culprits can get away. And it’s working.
2. No one has been punished. Executives like Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide , along with many others, cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars before the ship crashed into the rocks. Predatory lenders and crooked mortgage lenders walked away with millions in ill-gotten gains. But they aren’t in jail. They aren’t even under criminal prosecution. They got away scot-free. As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you’ve been treated. And so the next crowd will do it again. Guaranteed.
3. The incentives remain crooked. People outside finance — from respected political pundits like George Will to normal people on Main Street — still don’t fully get this. Wall Street rules aren’t like Main Street rules. The guy running a Wall Street bank isn’t in the same “risk/reward” situation as a guy running, say, a dry-cleaning shop. Take all our mental images of traditional American free-market enterprise and put them to one side. This is totally different. For the people on Wall Street, it’s a case of heads they win, tails they get to flip again. Thanks to restricted stock, options, the bonus game, securitization, 2-and-20 fee structures, insider stock sales, “too big to fail” and limited liability, they are paid to behave recklessly, and they lose little — or nothing — if things go wrong.
4. The referees are corrupt. We’re supposed to have a system of free enterprise under the law. The only problem: The players get to bribe the refs. Imagine if that happened in the NFL. The banks and other industries lavish huge amounts of money on Congress, presidents and the entire Washington establishment of aides, advisers and hangers-on. They do it through campaign contributions. They do it with $500,000 speaker fees and boardroom sinecures upon retirement. And they do it by spending a fortune on lobbyists — so you know that if you play nice when you’re in government, you too can get a $500,000-a-year lobbying job when you retire. How big are the bribes? The finance industry spent $474 million on lobbying last year alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Read more:
The last financial crisis isn’t over, but we might as well start getting ready for the next one.
Sorry to be gloomy, but there it is.
Why? Here are 10 reasons.
1. We are learning the wrong lessons from the last one. Was the housing bubble really caused by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, “liberals” and so on? That’s what a growing army of people now claim. There’s just one problem. If so, then how come there was a gigantic housing bubble in Spain as well? Did Barney Frank cause that, too (and while in the minority in Congress, no less!)? If so, how? And what about the giant housing bubbles in Ireland, the U.K. and Australia? All Barney Frank? And the ones across Eastern Europe, and elsewhere? I’d laugh, but tens of millions are being suckered into this piece of spin, which is being pushed in order to provide cover so the real culprits can get away. And it’s working.
2. No one has been punished. Executives like Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide , along with many others, cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars before the ship crashed into the rocks. Predatory lenders and crooked mortgage lenders walked away with millions in ill-gotten gains. But they aren’t in jail. They aren’t even under criminal prosecution. They got away scot-free. As a general rule, the worse you behaved from 2000 to 2008, the better you’ve been treated. And so the next crowd will do it again. Guaranteed.
3. The incentives remain crooked. People outside finance — from respected political pundits like George Will to normal people on Main Street — still don’t fully get this. Wall Street rules aren’t like Main Street rules. The guy running a Wall Street bank isn’t in the same “risk/reward” situation as a guy running, say, a dry-cleaning shop. Take all our mental images of traditional American free-market enterprise and put them to one side. This is totally different. For the people on Wall Street, it’s a case of heads they win, tails they get to flip again. Thanks to restricted stock, options, the bonus game, securitization, 2-and-20 fee structures, insider stock sales, “too big to fail” and limited liability, they are paid to behave recklessly, and they lose little — or nothing — if things go wrong.
4. The referees are corrupt. We’re supposed to have a system of free enterprise under the law. The only problem: The players get to bribe the refs. Imagine if that happened in the NFL. The banks and other industries lavish huge amounts of money on Congress, presidents and the entire Washington establishment of aides, advisers and hangers-on. They do it through campaign contributions. They do it with $500,000 speaker fees and boardroom sinecures upon retirement. And they do it by spending a fortune on lobbyists — so you know that if you play nice when you’re in government, you too can get a $500,000-a-year lobbying job when you retire. How big are the bribes? The finance industry spent $474 million on lobbying last year alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Read more:
Me, Inc.
by Pamela S. Karlan
When the Supreme Court heard Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886, few would have pegged the case as a turning point in constitutional law. The matter at hand seemed highly technical: could California increase the property tax owed by a railroad if the railroad built fences on its property? As it turned out, the Court ruled unanimously in the railroad’s favor. And in so doing, the Court casually affirmed the railroad’s argument that corporations are “persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” So certain were the justices of the Fourteenth Amendment’s applicability that their opinion did not engage the issue, but the Court reporter recorded the justices’ perspective on the topic:
Much criticism of the Citizens United decision has focused on whether corporations should have rights under the Constitution. This critique is mistaken. Corporations come in many forms, ranging from large, publicly traded profit-driven companies (think IBM) to smaller, ideologically motivated nonprofits (the American Civil Liberties Union or the Audubon Society) with many others in between (your local newspaper). The diverse nature of corporations may mean that some corporations have stronger claims than others with respect to particular rights, but on the whole it is clear that our democracy could not function if corporations received no constitutional protection. One of the most famous First Amendment decisions of the Warren Court, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), protected a for-profit newspaper from a libel suit for publishing a paid advertisement criticizing a public official. Many foundational freedom-of-association cases likewise involve corporations, such as the NAACP. And even with respect to purely economic rights, it is hard to argue persuasively that the government should have no obligation to provide due process to corporations before imposing fines or condemning their property.
So corporations are entitled to constitutional protection. But are they entitled to the same protection as living, breathing human beings? In this year’s Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, the Supreme Court suggested they are not so entitled. The Court refused to extend to AT&T a provision of the Freedom of Information Act that exempts the disclosure of material that might cause “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” A corporation, Chief Justice Roberts said, does not have the “type of privacy evocative of human concerns.” Similarly, corporations cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.
But even if the Court decided that corporations are in every way like persons, there might be limits on the corporate role in politics. When faced with the issue of popular confidence in the democratic process, courts have agreed that the speech rights of flesh-and-blood persons may be bounded. The Hatch Act, for example, forbids government employees from engaging in partisan political activity, including some activities in their off-time. In fact, when it comes to a willingness to restrict constitutional rights in the name of confidence in the democratic process, the Court’s decisions show a troubling and puzzling asymmetry in favor of corporations. A few years ago, the Court upheld Indiana’s draconian voter-identification statute, which threatened to deny the fundamental constitutional right to vote to thousands of individuals who lack government-issued photo ID. The Court asserted, “Public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process has independent significance, because it encourages citizen participation in the democratic process.” The Court nowhere explains why a similar rationale should not apply to political spending. Several legislatures think it does and have concluded that citizens are less likely to participate in a process they think is rigged in favor of large corporate interests.
The real question, then, is not whether corporations deserve some constitutional protections: they do. The issue is whether there is something about the nature of corporations that makes it appropriate to limit their involvement in the political process. The Court has foreclosed the most common affirmative answer to that question: corporations have accumulated enormous wealth, which enables them to distort a political process that rests on a commitment to equality, embodied most prominently in the principle of one person, one vote. The Citizens United decision rejected this argument by overruling a prior holding in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990).
Read more:
When the Supreme Court heard Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886, few would have pegged the case as a turning point in constitutional law. The matter at hand seemed highly technical: could California increase the property tax owed by a railroad if the railroad built fences on its property? As it turned out, the Court ruled unanimously in the railroad’s favor. And in so doing, the Court casually affirmed the railroad’s argument that corporations are “persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” So certain were the justices of the Fourteenth Amendment’s applicability that their opinion did not engage the issue, but the Court reporter recorded the justices’ perspective on the topic:
Before argument Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: ‘The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.’That statement marks the origin of the view that corporations are persons as a matter of constitutional law. This played a central role in the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that restricted corporate spending on electioneering communications in the run-up to a federal election. The Court declared that Congress could not discriminate between electioneering communications according to the identity of the speaker: since individual human beings clearly have a First Amendment right to speak about candidates during the election process, so too must corporations.
Much criticism of the Citizens United decision has focused on whether corporations should have rights under the Constitution. This critique is mistaken. Corporations come in many forms, ranging from large, publicly traded profit-driven companies (think IBM) to smaller, ideologically motivated nonprofits (the American Civil Liberties Union or the Audubon Society) with many others in between (your local newspaper). The diverse nature of corporations may mean that some corporations have stronger claims than others with respect to particular rights, but on the whole it is clear that our democracy could not function if corporations received no constitutional protection. One of the most famous First Amendment decisions of the Warren Court, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), protected a for-profit newspaper from a libel suit for publishing a paid advertisement criticizing a public official. Many foundational freedom-of-association cases likewise involve corporations, such as the NAACP. And even with respect to purely economic rights, it is hard to argue persuasively that the government should have no obligation to provide due process to corporations before imposing fines or condemning their property.
So corporations are entitled to constitutional protection. But are they entitled to the same protection as living, breathing human beings? In this year’s Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, the Supreme Court suggested they are not so entitled. The Court refused to extend to AT&T a provision of the Freedom of Information Act that exempts the disclosure of material that might cause “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” A corporation, Chief Justice Roberts said, does not have the “type of privacy evocative of human concerns.” Similarly, corporations cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.
But even if the Court decided that corporations are in every way like persons, there might be limits on the corporate role in politics. When faced with the issue of popular confidence in the democratic process, courts have agreed that the speech rights of flesh-and-blood persons may be bounded. The Hatch Act, for example, forbids government employees from engaging in partisan political activity, including some activities in their off-time. In fact, when it comes to a willingness to restrict constitutional rights in the name of confidence in the democratic process, the Court’s decisions show a troubling and puzzling asymmetry in favor of corporations. A few years ago, the Court upheld Indiana’s draconian voter-identification statute, which threatened to deny the fundamental constitutional right to vote to thousands of individuals who lack government-issued photo ID. The Court asserted, “Public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process has independent significance, because it encourages citizen participation in the democratic process.” The Court nowhere explains why a similar rationale should not apply to political spending. Several legislatures think it does and have concluded that citizens are less likely to participate in a process they think is rigged in favor of large corporate interests.
The real question, then, is not whether corporations deserve some constitutional protections: they do. The issue is whether there is something about the nature of corporations that makes it appropriate to limit their involvement in the political process. The Court has foreclosed the most common affirmative answer to that question: corporations have accumulated enormous wealth, which enables them to distort a political process that rests on a commitment to equality, embodied most prominently in the principle of one person, one vote. The Citizens United decision rejected this argument by overruling a prior holding in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990).
Read more:
Saturday, July 9, 2011
I Can Sea Clearly Now
See the world below you with remarkable clarity in this 2 person canoe. This hard shell transparent canoe provides 100% visability. It weighs only 40 lbs., and is lighter than most aluminum or wood canoes.
This canoe is beautiful and has a highly functional design. And it's tough. It's made out of the same polycarbonate material used in the production of bulletproof glass. The seats provide excellent back support and comfort. This canoe comes with a retractable skeg system that improves tracking which among other things, makes it easier to paddle long distances.
via:
A Woman Who Stood for Something
by Carl Sferrazza Anthony
A pro-choice Republican feminist, who used her first lady role to help transform our culture.
It would be easy to say that Betty Ford has one great claim to fame, as the leader of the national movement for substance abuse recovery because of the famous southern California treatment center that bears her name. Given the celebrity-soaked media, the pipsqueak actress Lindsay Lohan now seems to have more association with the name "Betty Ford" than does the woman herself. In reality, alcohol and drug treatment is but one in a number of issues that Mrs. Ford became a world-recognized trailblazer of by simply being herself – which is to say, speaking out honestly and rationally.
With her death at 93 on Friday, Betty Ford should command respect not for the coincidence of being married to the only President who was never even elected as a Vice President, or that she survived cancer, alcoholism and chronic osteopathic pain to become the third longest-living First Lady in history (Bess Truman died at 97, Lady Bird Johnson at 94) but rather for what she did with the public role she was thrust into and the values of justice and compassion she lived with all her years.
It might also be easy to label her a middle-American, middle-class political housewife who burst into prominence. As a child, however, she told me that Eleanor Roosevelt and her frank public opinion on a variety of political issues was just as important a role model for her as her own mother, who'd introduced her to the needs of disabled children. Volunteering as a young teenager in local clinics and hospitals where those with disabilities were treated, she taught them confidence and grace through the movement of dance, which she'd already had considerable training in. That passion drove her to pursue the rigor of training with the then-radical theories of modern dance with the legendary Martha Graham herself. She supported herself in a Greenwich Village walk-up by working as a print ad model. Later she saw to it that the modern dance movement leader was given the respect shown the traditional performing arts with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In the brief sweet spot of the so-called "Me Decade" that marked her tenure as First Lady, an era that also saw the mainstreaming of "personality" and traditional gossip columns with the creation of People magazine, Betty Ford deftly managed to shape her public persona directly from her private person, drawing on real experiences from a life never intended to be nationally broadcast. When she had breast cancer and a mastectomy, she went against tradition to publicly disclose the details because she recognized the visibility of her persona might save the lives of millions of other women who were living with it undetected until it was too late. She spoke openly about the value she'd gained from seeking the professional services of a mental health therapist and broke another taboo, hoping to reduce some of the stigma that had been socialized against it. She discussed her first marriage and divorce.
Her support on a variety of other women's health-related issues, including lupus and a woman's right to make decisions about their own bodies (she was careful to never endorse or criticize abortion but to instead support a woman's right to that choice) was at the core of her conscience, stemming from an ironclad belief in the equality of women and men. This conviction also emerged from personal experience. Before, during and after her first marriage, she had earned her own living, from a women's clothing buyer for a large department store to an assembly-line, frozen-food factory worker.
Read more:
Yogi Berra Will Be a Living Legend Even After He's Gone
by Joe Posnanski
No man in the history of American sports—perhaps even in the history of America—has spent a lifetime facing more expectant silences. And it is happening again. Another afternoon. Another silence. Strangers stand at a respectful distance and wait for Lawrence Peter Berra to say something funny and still wise, pithy but quirkily profound, obvious and yet strangely esoteric. A Yogi-ism.
It ain't over till it's over.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
You can observe a lot by watching.
In this case the strangers waiting in the silence are a mother and son. They had been touring the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls, N.J., in anticipation of having the boy's bar mitzvah here. The family had decided that there is no better place for a boy to become a man than in the museum of the greatest winner in the history of baseball. And when they got word that the legend himself was present, they had to meet him, of course. They found him here, in the museum office, looking for a glass of water.
"I cannot believe it's really you!" the woman says to Yogi Berra.
"It's really me," he says.
The woman pauses for a moment. Is that it? Is that the Yogi-ism? What did he mean by "really me"? Was he being existential? Could he be summoning Delphic wisdom from the temple of Apollo, that phrase which translates loosely as "Know thyself"? It's hard to tell. Yogi Berra is looking for water so he can take his medication. He is supposed to take it in about 45 minutes. He's getting nervous about it. Berra hates being late for anything.
It gets late early out here.
(At Yogi Berra Day in his hometown of St. Louis in 1947) Thank you for making this day necessary.
A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
"This is such an honor," the woman says after a moment or so. Berra nods sheepishly. Again there is the silence. The silence always surrounds Yogi Berra. It smothers him. Imagine having every word you say analyzed like bacteria in a petri dish. Imagine facing that look of wide-eyed anticipation whenever you are about to say something, anything. Once a man and woman came up to him at the museum and asked him to invent a Yogi-ism, on the spot. He told them it doesn't work that way. He does not just divine these phrases. He said, "If I could just make 'em up on the spot, I'd be famous." The couple laughed happily. Yogi Berra did not know what was so funny.
If people don't wanna come out to the park, nobody's gonna stop 'em.
If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer.
I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting.
The silence has become stifling. Yogi Berra, decked out in a Yankees hat and jacket, holding the water that he plans to use for his medication, looks out the window. Rain falls. The woman walks over to give him a hug, which he graciously accepts as the conclusion to the conversation. The woman repeats a few more words about how wonderful it is to meet him, and Yogi Berra continues to stay silent and stare out the window.
"How do you think the Yankees will do tonight?" she asks.
Yogi Berra shrugs. He doesn't make predictions. He hopes it will stop raining by game time.
From here on this will be a story without quotes. Well, there will be two Yogi Berra comments at the end, but that will be about it. There will be no new Yogi-isms. There will be no bits from others about how much Berra means to baseball. There will be none of that.
Yogi Berra is 86 years old, and he is probably the most quoted athlete of the last 100 years. The sampling above represent only a few of the dozens and dozens of quips and one-liners and bits of wisdom that have been attributed to him. Yogi Berra has now crossed into that American realm—with Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers—in which just about any famous collection of words gains prestige by being connected to his name. Just throw "As Yogi Berra says" in front of anything and, voilà, you're ready for the banquet circuit.
Read more:
image credit:
No man in the history of American sports—perhaps even in the history of America—has spent a lifetime facing more expectant silences. And it is happening again. Another afternoon. Another silence. Strangers stand at a respectful distance and wait for Lawrence Peter Berra to say something funny and still wise, pithy but quirkily profound, obvious and yet strangely esoteric. A Yogi-ism.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
You can observe a lot by watching.
In this case the strangers waiting in the silence are a mother and son. They had been touring the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls, N.J., in anticipation of having the boy's bar mitzvah here. The family had decided that there is no better place for a boy to become a man than in the museum of the greatest winner in the history of baseball. And when they got word that the legend himself was present, they had to meet him, of course. They found him here, in the museum office, looking for a glass of water.
"I cannot believe it's really you!" the woman says to Yogi Berra.
"It's really me," he says.
The woman pauses for a moment. Is that it? Is that the Yogi-ism? What did he mean by "really me"? Was he being existential? Could he be summoning Delphic wisdom from the temple of Apollo, that phrase which translates loosely as "Know thyself"? It's hard to tell. Yogi Berra is looking for water so he can take his medication. He is supposed to take it in about 45 minutes. He's getting nervous about it. Berra hates being late for anything.
It gets late early out here.
(At Yogi Berra Day in his hometown of St. Louis in 1947) Thank you for making this day necessary.
A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
"This is such an honor," the woman says after a moment or so. Berra nods sheepishly. Again there is the silence. The silence always surrounds Yogi Berra. It smothers him. Imagine having every word you say analyzed like bacteria in a petri dish. Imagine facing that look of wide-eyed anticipation whenever you are about to say something, anything. Once a man and woman came up to him at the museum and asked him to invent a Yogi-ism, on the spot. He told them it doesn't work that way. He does not just divine these phrases. He said, "If I could just make 'em up on the spot, I'd be famous." The couple laughed happily. Yogi Berra did not know what was so funny.
If people don't wanna come out to the park, nobody's gonna stop 'em.
If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer.
I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting.
The silence has become stifling. Yogi Berra, decked out in a Yankees hat and jacket, holding the water that he plans to use for his medication, looks out the window. Rain falls. The woman walks over to give him a hug, which he graciously accepts as the conclusion to the conversation. The woman repeats a few more words about how wonderful it is to meet him, and Yogi Berra continues to stay silent and stare out the window.
"How do you think the Yankees will do tonight?" she asks.
Yogi Berra shrugs. He doesn't make predictions. He hopes it will stop raining by game time.
From here on this will be a story without quotes. Well, there will be two Yogi Berra comments at the end, but that will be about it. There will be no new Yogi-isms. There will be no bits from others about how much Berra means to baseball. There will be none of that.
Yogi Berra is 86 years old, and he is probably the most quoted athlete of the last 100 years. The sampling above represent only a few of the dozens and dozens of quips and one-liners and bits of wisdom that have been attributed to him. Yogi Berra has now crossed into that American realm—with Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers—in which just about any famous collection of words gains prestige by being connected to his name. Just throw "As Yogi Berra says" in front of anything and, voilà, you're ready for the banquet circuit.
Read more:
image credit:
We Do Not Need Another Cat
We are down a cat. It's still too upsetting to talk about (rural life, tentative open window policy, probable coyote, lifetime of horrible, horrible guilt for not sticking to indoor cat guns), but we used to have two cats, the correct number of cats, and now we have one cat. An indoor cat.
And we can't really face the idea of acquiring a second cat, because a) we're having a human baby in a few months, and b) First Cat never really liked having a second cat, and now that she's Only Cat, she's super-stoked about it and prances around like she owns the place, and c) that would involve formally admitting that Second Cat is gone for good.
But, you know, I read the shelter intake emails every morning, even though Second Cat has been almost certainly deceased for a month now, and so I literally page through dozens of pictures of homeless cats on a daily basis, and it makes me feel like a ghoul. Even though, bless 'em, homeless cats usually put on great bitchface for the camera, you know? The dogs have that plaintive "where's my mommy?" thing going, and the cats are all "get that out of my face. I don't need you! I don't need anyone!"
And you start thinking, maybe an elderly boy cat? Just some big orangey lump? But then First Cat is all, "I tolerated Second Cat because she was from the same Brooklyn feral cluster as me. We were basically sisters. Don't push your luck. Did you see what I did to the stuffed bobcat you bought for your nieces?"
I don't know.
by Nicole Cliff, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost]
And we can't really face the idea of acquiring a second cat, because a) we're having a human baby in a few months, and b) First Cat never really liked having a second cat, and now that she's Only Cat, she's super-stoked about it and prances around like she owns the place, and c) that would involve formally admitting that Second Cat is gone for good.But, you know, I read the shelter intake emails every morning, even though Second Cat has been almost certainly deceased for a month now, and so I literally page through dozens of pictures of homeless cats on a daily basis, and it makes me feel like a ghoul. Even though, bless 'em, homeless cats usually put on great bitchface for the camera, you know? The dogs have that plaintive "where's my mommy?" thing going, and the cats are all "get that out of my face. I don't need you! I don't need anyone!"
And you start thinking, maybe an elderly boy cat? Just some big orangey lump? But then First Cat is all, "I tolerated Second Cat because she was from the same Brooklyn feral cluster as me. We were basically sisters. Don't push your luck. Did you see what I did to the stuffed bobcat you bought for your nieces?"
I don't know.
by Nicole Cliff, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost]
The World’s Narrowest House
Architect Jakub Szczęsny has laid out design concepts to fill in a small crack between an old tenement building and tower building in Warsaw, Poland with plans to erect the world’s narrowest house, which will be 60 inches in width.
Talented Israeli writer Etgar Keret is a symbolic patron of the project and he will be given “the main pair of keys” to the house. After the house officially opens on Feb 4, 2012, Keret will spend the first month there and later on will share it as a studio for a select few creative and intellectual individuals from around the world. At the center of what Szczesny considers an art installation that he has aptly entitled, “Ermitage” or hermitage in English, is the residency program that will house these individuals and hopefully, foster a worldwide creative and intellectual exchange.
The architect has shared with Home-Designing some exclusive pictures of this project.
The house has one bedroom, bathroom, lounge, kitchen all on two floors, yet little room for one’s personal possessions and furniture. A ladder will also need to be used in order to move through the two floors. Its interior will come to 52 inches (133 centimeters) at its widest spot. “I saw the gap and just thought it needed filling. It will be used by artists.” Says Szczesny of the inspiration for his designs.
Talented Israeli writer Etgar Keret is a symbolic patron of the project and he will be given “the main pair of keys” to the house. After the house officially opens on Feb 4, 2012, Keret will spend the first month there and later on will share it as a studio for a select few creative and intellectual individuals from around the world. At the center of what Szczesny considers an art installation that he has aptly entitled, “Ermitage” or hermitage in English, is the residency program that will house these individuals and hopefully, foster a worldwide creative and intellectual exchange.
The architect has shared with Home-Designing some exclusive pictures of this project.
The house has one bedroom, bathroom, lounge, kitchen all on two floors, yet little room for one’s personal possessions and furniture. A ladder will also need to be used in order to move through the two floors. Its interior will come to 52 inches (133 centimeters) at its widest spot. “I saw the gap and just thought it needed filling. It will be used by artists.” Says Szczesny of the inspiration for his designs.
Opium Made Easy
By Michael Pollan
[ed. A very long and interesting read. Originally published in Harpers, April, 1997.]
Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law. Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that. My poppies were, or became, felonious; another gardener’s might or might not be. The legality of growing opium poppies (whose seeds are sold under many names, including the breadseed poppy, Papaver paeoniflorum, and, most significantly, Papaver somniferum) is a tangled issue, turning on questions of nomenclature and epistemology that it took me the better part of the summer to sort out. But before I try to explain, let me offer a friendly warning to any gardeners who might wish to continue growing this spectacular annual: the less you know about it, the better off you are, in legal if not horticultural terms. Because whether or not the opium poppies in your garden are illicit depends not on what you do, or even intend to do, with them but very simply on what you know about them. Hence my warning: if you have any desire to grow opium poppies, you would be wise to stop reading right now.
As for me, I’m afraid that, at least in the eyes of the law, I’m already lost, having now tasted of the forbidden fruit of poppy knowledge. Indeed, the more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies became—and the more fearful grew my days and to some extent also my nights. Until the day last fall, that is, when I finally pulled out my poppies’ withered stalks and, with a tremendous feeling of relief, threw them on the compost, thereby (I hope) rejoining the ranks of gardeners who don’t worry about visits from the police.
It started out if not quite innocently, then legally enough. Or at least that’s what I thought back in February, when I added a couple of poppy varieties (P. somniferum as well as P. paeoniflorum and P. rhoeas) to my annual order of flowers and vegetables from the seed catalogues. But the state of popular (and even expert) knowledge about poppies is confused, to say the least; mis- and even disinformation is rife. I’d read in Martha Stewart Living that “contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing P. somniferum.” Before planting, I consulted my Taylor’s Guide to Annuals, a generally reliable reference that did allude to the fact that “the juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the production of which is illegal in the United States.” But Taylor’s said nothing worrisome about the plants themselves. I figured that if the seeds could be sold legally (and I found somniferum on offer in a half-dozen well-known catalogues, though it was not always sold under that name), how could the obvious next step—i.e., planting the seeds according to the directions on the packet—possibly be a federal offense? Were this the case, you would think there’d at least be a disclaimer in the catalogues.
So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy.
[ed. A very long and interesting read. Originally published in Harpers, April, 1997.]
Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law. Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that. My poppies were, or became, felonious; another gardener’s might or might not be. The legality of growing opium poppies (whose seeds are sold under many names, including the breadseed poppy, Papaver paeoniflorum, and, most significantly, Papaver somniferum) is a tangled issue, turning on questions of nomenclature and epistemology that it took me the better part of the summer to sort out. But before I try to explain, let me offer a friendly warning to any gardeners who might wish to continue growing this spectacular annual: the less you know about it, the better off you are, in legal if not horticultural terms. Because whether or not the opium poppies in your garden are illicit depends not on what you do, or even intend to do, with them but very simply on what you know about them. Hence my warning: if you have any desire to grow opium poppies, you would be wise to stop reading right now.As for me, I’m afraid that, at least in the eyes of the law, I’m already lost, having now tasted of the forbidden fruit of poppy knowledge. Indeed, the more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies became—and the more fearful grew my days and to some extent also my nights. Until the day last fall, that is, when I finally pulled out my poppies’ withered stalks and, with a tremendous feeling of relief, threw them on the compost, thereby (I hope) rejoining the ranks of gardeners who don’t worry about visits from the police.
It started out if not quite innocently, then legally enough. Or at least that’s what I thought back in February, when I added a couple of poppy varieties (P. somniferum as well as P. paeoniflorum and P. rhoeas) to my annual order of flowers and vegetables from the seed catalogues. But the state of popular (and even expert) knowledge about poppies is confused, to say the least; mis- and even disinformation is rife. I’d read in Martha Stewart Living that “contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing P. somniferum.” Before planting, I consulted my Taylor’s Guide to Annuals, a generally reliable reference that did allude to the fact that “the juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the production of which is illegal in the United States.” But Taylor’s said nothing worrisome about the plants themselves. I figured that if the seeds could be sold legally (and I found somniferum on offer in a half-dozen well-known catalogues, though it was not always sold under that name), how could the obvious next step—i.e., planting the seeds according to the directions on the packet—possibly be a federal offense? Were this the case, you would think there’d at least be a disclaimer in the catalogues.
So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy.
First U.S. Open or 31st, Challenge is the Same
Mariel Galdiano, 13, left, and Betsy King, 55, right, have converged at the United States Women’s Open.
[ed. Sadly, it looks like neither lady will make the cut this weekend.]
by Karen Crouse
In 1998, Mariel Galdiano was born in Honolulu. That same year, Betsy King became the first golfer to surpass $6 million in career earnings on the L.P.G.A. Tour.
Galdiano, 13, and King, 55, are from eras as far removed as Venus is from Mars. Their worlds have converged at the United States Women’s Open, where Galdiano, a four-time Hawaii state junior champion, started the week on equal footing with King, a three-time tour player of the year.
They met on Wednesday on the practice range, after Galdiano made a guest appearance at a clinic run by Annika Sorenstam, the Hall of Fame golfer who won the Open the only other time it was held here, in 1995.
King said she laughed when Sorenstam asked Galdiano about her daily routine and heard Galdiano say, “I go to school and then my dad picks me up after school and takes me to the golf course.” King, who is using a putter that is 14 years older than Galdiano, said, “That’s when it hit me how young she is.”
It is the first Open for Galdiano and the 31st — and almost certainly last — one for King, the 1989 and 1990 champion. Galdiano, who had a morning tee time, played 13 holes in six over par before play was suspended because of inclement weather. King was among 72 players who did not tee off before the round was suspended.
Of the two, one was predictably so nervous in the days leading to Thursday that she had a recurring nightmare in which she was standing on the first tee but could not make a free swing because a towering pine stood in her way.
That would be King, whose personality developed a sandpaper edge from grinding during tournament weeks.
Read more:
Friday, July 8, 2011
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